I-Engineering

The I-Engineering project works to co-develop and implement energy engineering for sustainable community tools and materials with middle school students and teachers. These tools and materials support youth in designing solutions to challenges that matter to their local community. Youth develop expertise in renewable energy systems, circuitry, engineering practices and community ethnography. Through this work, the I-Engineering team has developed and collected resources that will support others in teaching engineering for sustainable communities and in ways that support youth in developing STEM knowledge and practices, and engaging in productive identity work in engineering, capable of making a difference in the world.

I-Engineering

The I-Engineering project works to co-develop and implement energy engineering for sustainable community tools and materials with middle school students and teachers. These tools and materials support youth in designing solutions to challenges that matter to their local community. Youth develop expertise in renewable energy systems, circuitry, engineering practices and community ethnography. Through this work, the I-Engineering team has developed and collected resources that will support others in teaching engineering for sustainable communities and in ways that support youth in developing STEM knowledge and practices, and engaging in productive identity work in engineering, capable of making a difference in the world.

2340 Views

Share Presentation

Tami LaFleur

Facilitator

May 15, 2017 | 08:45 a.m.

What stood out for me when I viewed this project is that students are designing solutions to challenges that matter in their local community. The example shown was the classroom- these students identified an issue in their school and then designed and implemented a solution! It reminded me of the restroom on an airplane- everyone can see the lights when the room is occupied. :) Does your project give support to any classroom teacher that would like to implement I-Engineering? How did your teachers get the materials needed for developing solutions and the science content knowledge needed?

2

Discussion is closed. Upvoting is no longer available

Found helpful:Angela Calabrese BartonMichael Kolodziej

Kathleen Schenkel

Co-Presenter

May 15, 2017 | 09:43 a.m.

Thanks for watching our video and for your questions Tami! We work with classroom teachers throughout the year to co-develop our unit, and implement it. We started with a weeklong professional development program session using the I-Engineering materials to support teachers in deepening their knowledge and practice of engineering design and disciplinary core ideas of energy transformations, sources, and systems as a part of engaging in engineering for sustainable communities. We also provided in-classroom support as they used the I-Engineering curriculum and materials with their students. We help provide them with the lights, copper tape and energy sources for the the engineering challenges, and the students transform other materials readily available in their classrooms to engineer for sustainable communities. We will make the whole curriculum readily available in later stages of our project, but some resources are available now on our website: engineeriam.org.

In I-Engineering, we have worked collaboratively with teachers and students using participatory design research methods to co-develop and implement energy engineering for sustainable community tools and materials in their classrooms. In this video, we discuss how teachers and students implemented one of our units (“How can I make my classroom more sustainable?”). In the unit, they integrated community ethnography into the engineering design process as a way to engage with community perspectives. Using what they learned about engineering practices and the DCIs of energy transformations, sources and systems, students were supported by teachers in identifying problems meaningful to the classroom and local community, and applying their STEM knowledge to iteratively prototype working solutions. As the teacher of the Occupied group said, “this is one project that will really promote classroom sustainability.” As a student in the Occupied group said, “This was the first time I felt like I could be an engineer.” Our goal is to support teachers and students in developing their agency and identities in engineering while gaining deeper knowledge and practices in science and engineering.

1

Discussion is closed. Upvoting is no longer available

Found helpful:Jennifer Stiles

Sherry Hsi

Researcher

May 17, 2017 | 03:01 p.m.

In the video, I really liked how identity was framed as not only becoming more knowledgeable and capable in practices, but also defined to include learner agency and recognition. I wonder if you can say more about recognition part. Is this self or peer recognition or teacher's recognition of students? The story about the shift in the teacher is so powerful. Can you also share the roles of graduate students and/or other community members were involved in this work as part of the learning community?

Edna Tan

Co-Presenter

May 17, 2017 | 08:40 p.m.

Hi Sherry,

Thanks for your comments! We see recognition as key to students' positive identity work in engineering. Teacher recognition is essential and we work recognition prompts deliberately into the curriculum. Also, the nature of the i-engineering curriculum is such that the students are positioned quite immediately as insiders to their community with expert knowledge and they engage in community ethnography to collaboratively identify areas of concern that they can design solutions for, informed by community feedback. This approach necessitates peer and self-recognition in the process. What the students ended up innovating also continued to solidify peer and self recognition --for example the Occupied innovation is a constant visual symbol of the creators' creativity and practicality as community engineers. As for researchers on the team apart from the PIs, 3 grad students at MSU and 1 postdoc at UNCG participated with the PIs as co-teachers and facilitators during the classroom IENG instruction period. We are all committed to an equity-oriented, anti-deficit lens, so we model recognition of the students' ideas and contributions whenever we can. In addition, during the feedback sessions, we solicited help engineer friends in the community to give feedback to the students on their design, which we think further supports students' developing identity work in engineering --they get real feedback from practicing engineers.

1

Discussion is closed. Upvoting is no longer available

Found helpful:Sherry Hsi

Tami LaFleur

Facilitator

May 15, 2017 | 09:52 a.m.

Thank you, Kathleen! I am going to check out this site. Thank you.

1

Discussion is closed. Upvoting is no longer available

Found helpful:Kathleen Schenkel

Tami LaFleur

Facilitator

May 15, 2017 | 09:53 a.m.

"This was the first time I felt like I could be an engineer" says it all!

Fabulous project! The kids in particular made me smile when they talked about the work and seeing themselves as engineers.

Kathleen Schenkel

Co-Presenter

May 16, 2017 | 11:03 a.m.

Thanks, Kate! We are learning so much with youth in this project. I checked out your video, and am really impressed by your team's argumentation toolkit. What a great way to support teachers!

Tami LaFleur

Facilitator

May 15, 2017 | 08:13 p.m.

Kathleen-

Thank you for sharing your project with everyone. I went to the site you suggested, and there are many tools for teachers to use for free. I like the template for the design process. Providing tools to teachers will help to keep this project going for years to come.

Kathleen Schenkel

Christopher Whitmer

Love that last bit, it says it all. Yes we do see ourselves as engineers but we still have a lot to learn.

2

Discussion is closed. Upvoting is no longer available

Found helpful:Angela Calabrese BartonMichael Kolodziej

Edna Tan

Co-Presenter

May 16, 2017 | 07:38 p.m.

Thanks for stopping by, Christopher. We are excited by how many of the students are starting to explore more deeply what engineering entails and what engineers do, and to see themselves as being capable of engaging in engineering practices. One student talked about how frustrated he was when figuring out trade-offs, he said "I was MAD all the time, but I was happy." As researchers and teachers, we too have a lot to learn.

Dale McCreedy

Facilitator

May 16, 2017 | 10:07 p.m.

Hi Angie - great project - and so great to see what I suspect grew from a project of yours that I followed years ago! Are you following these kiddos long term? What are you seeing with respect to where they are going and how their identities are developing? I am intrigued by your comment "Our goal is to support teachers and students in developing their agency and identities in engineering while gaining deeper knowledge and practices in science and engineering." Do you see teachers and students co-learning and teachers more transparent in sharing their authority and agency?

Hi Dale: Thank you for your comment. The insights of my past projects have most definitely informed the work we have been doing with teachers and students in this project. We piloted our materials with teachers in 9 classrooms this semester (full pilot in 6 of them), and we are just beginning to really dig into the data. However, our preliminary analysis offers some powerful examples of teachers sharing epistemic authority with students in ways that opened not only opportunities for student learning, but also opportunities for students to develop their science agency. An example tied to the bathroom lights story in the video is the teacher describing that she struggled with figuring out how to help students go from their 2-d sketches of their ideas (where she could tell if the circuits would sketched out properly) to the 3-d constructions (where she struggled, alongside the students). She said that she realized that she could say "I don't get this. Mateo [student] could you look at this. Sometimes you can find student experts. . . It wasn’t like it's a disaster that I could not always do it. I could say who really gets this. Could you look at this for me and tell me what you think? This was a situation where I had to step back because some of them were better than me. And that’s fine. It worked."

I love when the teachers becomes comfortable learning with their students, and that seems to be an essential component of the I-Engineering method. We know how hard it can be to change a developed practice and start something new, particularly when you've become comfortable as many teachers have in lecture and other methods of learning. Anyhow, I wonder which methods of support for teachers implementing I-Engineering have yielded the greatest results, particularly for those who may not feel naturally technically inclined.

Hi Michael: Thank you for your comments. We are still combing through our data to figure some of these things out as our goal is to be able to support teachers (and students) with the tools and materials rather than an intensive presence in their classroom. However, I will point out a few that we do believe were impactful, in part, because the teachers mentioned them as very helpful.

Our I-Eng framework is grounded in engineering for sustainable communities approach (see NRC, 2010), and a large part of that approach is to incorporate participatory approaches to allow for multiple perspectives/shared ownership across the design process. We do think that this helped to reduce the risk of “not knowing” for many of our participating teachers. No one expected them (or us, as project leaders) to know what the community needed exactly, or how they would input into the design process. We built in many structures within the curriculum to support/open up the dialog between the teacher/students and the community, and which also allowed for teachers and students to play different kinds of expert roles. Being able to legitimately say “I dont know” (because you are not supposed to know necessarily) really helped to shift the authority in the classroom space.
We sought to design our materials as educative (Davis et al) but we added new dimensions to that in terms of what it means to learn about students cultural repertoires of practice and how that informs learning in STEM. For example, we used an artifact called “postcards” created by youth (co-developers in our pre-pilot) where they literally made postcards that described their engineering design (what the design is, problem it solves, how it works (technical dimensions), how it addresses community concerns (social dimensions), and what they valued about the process and themselves. These postcards became key tools that teachers would be use to make sense of how to connect engineering with community, and shared designs that they could point to in their work with the students in their classroom as they sought to help them take next steps in their own designs (how did Amiah make the light up umbrella? What input did she need?). We have other tools built into the materials that provided these sorts of structures. (Students then made their own postcards at the end of the design challenge — which, by the way, took between 4 and 6 weeks depending on which classroom in our pilot).
We also sought to reduce the risk that teachers might feel during implementing this unit by being in the classroom with them. However, our role in the classrooms was as a member of a distributed network of experts - teachers, students, community members and us. Next year will be interesting because we will have a less intensive role in the classrooms as we seek to engage in a larger classroom studies on our tools and materials.
(We also held a weeklong teacher PD in summer where we engaged the materials together, and periodic debriefs during the implementation phase).

Thank you Angela for your thoughtful response. One thing that I see in there that is a big one I think, is the narrative that allows people to not know, without shame. So powerful!

1

Discussion is closed. Upvoting is no longer available

Found helpful:Kathleen Schenkel

Prof. Archer

Higher Ed Faculty

May 17, 2017 | 11:34 a.m.

This is fantastic and so inspiring. We would love to see this sort of approach brought to the UK. A compelling vision for equitable engineering education everywhere!

1

Discussion is closed. Upvoting is no longer available

Found helpful:Angela Calabrese Barton

Kathleen Schenkel

Co-Presenter

May 17, 2017 | 09:32 p.m.

Thank you, Professor Archer. This project is helping us to really think about what equitable engineering education means. One way to support equity-oriented engineering is our engineering for sustainable communities approach. Using this approach, the youth have really have defined problems that matter to their community and included their community members' perspectives throughout the iterative design process. This has led the young people to consider ways to balance technical and social design specifications in their green energy powered engineering designs.

Dale McCreedy

Facilitator

May 17, 2017 | 11:09 p.m.

I think the hardest thing for any teacher/facilitator/parent/human to do is to say I don't know - not sure why given that, of course, we don't and can't know everything right?!? I definitely take your teachers willingness to ask for help as a measure of confidence and trust and would love to think that we can work for this in and out of school. Great job Angie!!

I really appreciate the focus on the social aspects of engineering. Our video, talks about a project we started last summer with upper elementary and middle school teachers and they were particularly interested in this aspect of engineering. Are there resources you would share with practitioners to support their implementation of this aspect in their classrooms? Thanks!

Kathleen Schenkel

Co-Presenter

May 18, 2017 | 12:35 p.m.

Hi Jen!

Similar to the work you shared in your team's video, we work with teachers to help them experience what it is like to engineer before they implement the I-Engineering curriculum with students. Something that we have found to be really helpful is to have teachers learn from the engineering work of students.

For example, the teachers explored examples of students' work at every stage of the engineering design process in our professional development program over the summer. We shared with them transcripts and student produced videos and postcards where the students explained how and why they made their engineering designs. These examples highlighted both the technical and social aspects of their engineering design process. It was powerful to see how the teachers utilized what they learned from the students as they engaged in their own engineering work. We have some resources that include students' work and experiences on our website: engineeriam.org. You might also want to check out our design cycle that focuses on both the technical and social aspects of engineering. Keep checking back because we will continue to add more resources as we learn with students and teachers.

Great video and fabulous project! I love how the students solved a significant social and emotional dilemma using engineering design. I also appreciate how deeply you've theorized the connections between identity, belonging, and STEM learning.

I totally agree! I also like the healthy representation of girls in the video. I liked the sense of wonder they espoused at the work they were doing. I hope they continue to pursue engineering.

Kathleen Schenkel

Co-Presenter

May 22, 2017 | 08:29 a.m.

Thanks for your comment, Rachel. We hope the students have even more opportunities to feel welcomed to do science and engineering and to be recognized for all of the expertise they bring to it. One student describe the barriers to participating in STEM identity work when she said, "I guess that they would see that this wasn’t made by professors at an institute or something, but it was made by you know a middle school girl at that!” Through her engineering work and calling out stereotypes, she resisted who gets to engineer.

Kathleen Schenkel

Co-Presenter

May 20, 2017 | 12:40 p.m.

Thank you, Leslie. It has been really exciting seeing how the youth's engineering designs continue to be used to address community concerns. Every time the Occupied bathroom alert light is activated, its creators are recognized for both their engineering and community expertise, and kids feel much more comfortable using the restroom than they used to be. This continuing recognition supports the students' on-going identity work, and supports their belonging in STEM and their classroom communities. Thank you for checking out our video!